My recent post on identity and Amin Maalouf seems to have drawn an absolute blank here, even though I personally consider the points he raises to be at the heart of the WoT and related issues. Over in Canada, Randy McDonald has picked up the thread, and relates Maalouf’s ideas to the issue of [...]

Well, this about beats the lot of them. Yesterday the shares Groupe Danone SA went through the roof on rumours of a takeover by PepsiCo Inc. Dominique de Vil-pin also went through the roof:
“Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said Danone was “among the jewels of our industry”…. “We plan to defend France’s interests,” Villepin said [...]

The expression ‘global imbalances’ has become somewhat fashionable of late. But what exactly are these imbalances, and why are they important. The IMF in its most recent World Economic Outlook draws attention to two of them:
The (current) expansion has become less balanced. Growth has been stronger than expected in the United States, where the ?soft [...]

I suppose by-now every right thinking and reasonably well read adult knows what the ‘poverty-trap’ is, even if most of us aren’t too clear about what there is to do about it. Being stuck in one of these traps could be thought to be like being stuck in a (not necessarily very deep) well with [...]

Controversy continues to surround the problem of assessing non-combatant casualties in time of war. The Swiss based Graduate Institute of International Studies has just published its latest annual small arms survey where it suggests some 39,000 Iraqis have been killed as a direct result of combat or armed violence since the start of [...]

I don’t know if we have a lot of crossover readers from Tapped, but in the context of otherwise mostly reasonable remarks in two posts about the London bombings, they missed something important.

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Those who want a break from all the introspection over terrorism could do worse than let their minds run free on the implications of what is happening in China and India, or puzzle about holiday destinations now that the euro is going down while some other destinations are evidently seeing the value of their money [...]

Clay Risen has a perceptive article in Slate today, warning non-German observers that Angela Merkel (Gerd Schr?der’s likely successor) is no Margaret Thatcher. But embedded in that article is this astounding sentence:
[T]he CDU … is actually an alliance between the more free-market-oriented Christian Democrats, from which Merkel hails, and the more economically liberal Bavarian Christian [...]

Mala leche (nothing to do with the CAP) we would probably call it here in Spain, bad blood (again not connected with mad cows) might be the English expression. We’re all off to Singapore apparently, and the fair ground side-show seems to be up and running. On this one I’m impartial, I’m being very pc [...]

A few days back I had a post, Iraq’s Legacy, which dealt with the issue of whether or not the continuing Iraq war was in fact serving to increase the level of international terrorism, and whether at the end of the day we might not be left with a bigger headache than the one we [...]